“The most parliamentary government in history”, as President Pedro Sánchez underlined last Wednesday in Congress, “out of conviction and necessity”, lives in a recurring weekly instability, but obtains almost the same percentage of votes as the previous legislature: 88% against 91%. The executive finds itself in a clear minority, after the exit of Junts from the investiture block, with a more diversified and complex legislature than ever in a drift that has worsened in the last decade and which has repercussions above all on the fall of the parliamentary representation of the PSOE and the PP. Between the socialist governments of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Pedro Sánchez, in less than 15 years, bipartisanship lost 134 seats, 38.43%, and from 10 parties in the Chamber it went to 16.
Former president Zapatero himself assessed this situation a few days ago in a speech at Los Desayunos del Ateneo to praise the current difficulty of managing the Parliament that has emerged from the polls in 2023, with a diminishing minority government. Zapatero has always maintained that these Cortes, with so much presence and influence of nationalist and regionalist parties, are more similar to Spain than to the peculiar Madrid that lives within the M-30.
The current Congress therefore has, in theory, greater political power to counteract the weaknesses of the Executive, propose alternative laws and approve them. The Secretary of State for Relations with the Cortes, Rafael Simancas, elaborated on this idea in his latest article in the magazine Fundación Sistema: “It is curious how the arguments that delegitimize parliamentary democracy evolve. When governments have consolidated parliamentary majorities, we talk about nonsense. When popular will promotes more plural parliaments and minority governments, the criticism is of instability and bad governance. The opponents of democracy always find delegitimizing arguments.”
The decline of the bipartisanship that has plagued the PSOE and PP over a decade makes the functioning of the legislative branch more difficult or different. Between 2008 and 2019, between Zapatero and the first Sánchez, the two large parties lost 39% of representation and 134 seats. They went from 323 deputies out of the 350 total in the Chamber to the minimum of 189 in the elections of April 28, 2019. Now, in this XV legislature they are just over, 258, 64%, when they reached 83.81%.
The most significant leap for classic bipartisanship occurred between Zapatero’s last government, in 2008, and Mariano Rajoy’s second, in 2015, when Podemos and Ciudadanos entered the scene, while PP and PSOE left 110 deputies.
Furthermore, in Congress there are more parties, with more diversity and more pacts or alliances, as has long been the case in much of Europe. This was the justification behind which Sánchez himself hid last Wednesday to argue “the necessity and conviction” of having formed the first coalition government in this democratic phase of Spain. There is no national custom or precedent. In 2019 the Cortes hosted a record 16 matches compared to nine in 2016, with increasingly numerous and heterogeneous mixed groups.
This scenario carries over to the daily activity full of uncertainties of the Cortes, with its plenary sessions and its votes. The PSOE spokesperson himself, Patxi López, recognized last Friday on RNE what is observed every week in the Congress: he knows how he arrives at the Table and the Council of Spokesmen on Tuesday, but not how the plenary session on Thursday will end. It happens every week. Now more clearly after the Junts’ sit-in, which however will not mean the defeat of all the proposed initiatives, as was confirmed last Thursday when 116 votes were recorded and 100 obtained, some of which were very symbolic.
In the next few weeks, in the three plenary sessions remaining before the Christmas break and the electoral campaign in Extremadura, the validation of the decrees providing 500 million in funding for ALS sufferers (this week) or for dana sufferers in the Valencian Community (next week) will pass to the plenary session, and no one expects Junts to boycott them again. This will happen with other proposals, although not with the predictable vote of Carles Puigdemont’s seven deputies against the deficit path, the spending ceiling and the budgets for 2026. The Government already has it, but it will quantify well the items that will be deducted from the public accounts for the investments planned in Catalonia.
PP and Vox repeat incessantly before every discussion in Congress that the government is dead, rotten, paralyzed and without any activity. PNV and the Canarian Coalition, always under the most discreet spotlight, begin to fear, and even more so after the departure of Junts, that the weekly agony will end up being terminal. Left-wing allies call for more courage, but in another direction.
The coalition government formed by PSOE and Sumar starts from the assumption that this is its playing field and even boasts that in these seven years of Sanchism and small parliamentary minorities, 250 laws have been approved, 47 in these two years of mandate. From now on they will purge the agenda a little more, to raise more objections to Junts’ rejections, but in the refrigerator there remain another 30 projects that have already passed the entire editing process and are in the process of editing articles or being presented. Junts, however, only admits to having signed and committed three bills which are added to the two supported this week and which are the ELA decree and the laws on the social economy and on cinema. On the other 25 he will present integral amendments.
In these two years of mandate, there were 1,575 votes in the Congress, the Government won 1,379 (88%) and lost 196. In the previous legislature, with Podemos still in office, and not like now that it is in opposition, the Executive successfully promoted 215 legal initiatives – 118 laws, 96 royal decrees and one royal legislative decree -, and 143 are were approved by an absolute majority (91% of those presented in full and 66% of the total). PNV and EH Bildu were then, as today, the most reliable partners.
